SIGNS OF PRETENSE

One amazing ability that very young children seem to have
is that of marking a certain category of acts as pretend,
not to be taken seriously. Natural selection would
certainly opt for a cognitive system that constructs models
of how the world actually is. How is it that this system,
especially very young versions of it, can purposefully
misconstrue the world? Furthermore, given that adults most
often present to the child the world as it actually is, how
do children know when to make exception, and construe an
adult's (or anyone else's) behavior as pretense instead?

How does the young child come to understand that theseadults are pretending to sing into microphones--that thebananas are being used in a symbolic way?

What enables children to make a pretense interpretation is
a largely unexplored question about one of childhood's
major activities, and our research aims to make important headway towards discovering
the conditions that accompany a pretense interpretation.
Our hypothesis is that pretense acts are characterized by
specific behavioral regularities. Such regularities may
serve as cues to pretense interpreters, effectively
signaling, "This is pretense."

To examine this, we have
been analyzing matched pretense and real episodes for
behavioral regularities that are uniquely associated with
the pretense mode. In a first experiment, parents were
asked to pretend to have a snack, and to really have a
snack, while seated across a table from their
18-month-olds. Time-synchronized hidden videocameras
filmed both parent and child. In some experiments, a
motion analyzing system measures the parents' movements
during both events, and in others, a the Computer Speech
Lab is used to analyze features of parents' voices that
vary across settings. The pretend and real snack events
are compared for the relative frequency and degree of
several possible cues.

Pilot and animal work suggested
that several behaviors may consistently differ, such as
facial configurations (smiles, raised brows); gestures that
are oddly timed, or that exceed or fall short of their
"real" paths of motion; and the use of sounds that simulate
real counterparts (like saying "gulp" when pretending to
drink). Many have commented that pretending involves
"knowing smiles," but we know of no descriptions of exactly
what such a smile (if it exists) looks like.

Dressed for Halloween as "the sea," this young childextends the pretense by going fishing.

Using the
Facial Action Coding system (Ekman & Rosenberg, 1997), we
will examine whether the smiles parents emit during
pretense events differ from those issued during real
events, and if so, how. Other experiments are ongoing to
examine the generalizability of these regularities to home
settings, to nonpretense and to other pretense acts, and to
addressees of different ages. We are also examining links
to other early social cognitive skills, like social
referencing and joint attention.

A second major question we will
address is which of those behaviors that
are regularly provided with pretense acts actually indicate
to observers that those acts are pretense. This is being
done by showing the episodes filmed in the first experiment
to children and adults, to ensure they interpret the acts
as pretense or real. In addition, we have been
systematically filtering cues. For example, to some
participants we have played only the audio portion, or
shown only the face, and in each case participants have
judged whether the events are pretense or real. In another
set of experiments, we will examine whether children's
ability to interpret pretense improves when the signs of
pretense are provided.

This research is providing an
important first step in a rich program to decipher how
pretense acts are conveyed and understood. The work is
novel in its focus on objective measurement of
paralinguistic cues to pretense, its direct comparison of
pretense and real acts, and its examination of how parents
pretend in front of young children. Paralinguistic cues to
pretense have been anecdotally mentioned in the literature
but have rarely been subjected to objective and
programmatic measurement and analysis.